I looked at the CD cover artwork for Lisa Papineau’s “Night Moves” with hope–it was comfortable, simple and inviting. It made me want to smoke some pot, take my shoes off and make snow-less snow angels in the green grass of my Los Angeles front yard. I put the disc in my CD player and sat down excitedly on my floor to do some painting. I was secretly hoping the album would bear parallels to Air’s “Talkie Walkie,” an album to which Lisa Papineau lent her vocals. “Talkie Walkie” is deliciously different from Air’s earlier music. Like the course of Radiohead’s musical journey, it shows progression and development–a positive and pleasant divergence from their previous musical output.
I was egregiously disappointed. The first six tracks left me bored. Instead of painting, I just sat on my floor, brow furrowed. I kept thinking that if Sarah McLachlan had been blindfolded, sedated and kidnapped from the nineties, and then thrown into the new millennium to embark on her musical career, it might sound like this. Lyrical? Kinda. Melodic? I suppose. Complex? Compelling? Passionate? Interesting? No, no, no and NO!
I felt like I had felt when I bought Sia’s solo album. Zero 7’s “Simple Things” touched me deeply, left me aching for more. It’s an incredible album. I checked out their other albums and was sadly less than impressed, however. When I heard that Sia, their female vocalist, had her own album coming out, I was first in line to buy it. And was first to be disappointed. I feel similarly cheated by “Night Moves.”
Luckily, after six tracks something changed briefly. It’s amusing, because the title of the song, “What are we waiting for?” asked the very question I had been posing in my mind. Why were they waiting until track seven to wake up and smell the listener? There is a resonance in that song that affected me subcutaneously. It worked its way under my skin and into my veins and bones. There it vibrated, managing against all odds for a little over five minutes to hold my attention. It wasn’t because the lyrics of this song are poetic or moving, nor because the music is more substantially crafted. There’s just one indescribable element to it that compelled my frown to momentarily disappear. I might actually download that one onto my iPod. But once I’ve done that, I’m mailing the CD off to Bob Seger. Maybe he can make “Night Moves” work for him.
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